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Description
The late 19th and early 20th century suburbs of San Diego were originally connected to the city's commercial core by horse-drawn and electric trolleys. This thesis investigates how historical archaeology contributes to our understanding of these neighborhoods. Popular research over the past few decades has largely focused on the homes of San Diego pioneers and on large-scale development in the downtown center. However, recent cultural resource management projects (CRM) supporting condominium development and utility construction have uncovered numerous small historical deposits in the suburbs that have been not been considered in past research, and explored whether useful information could be derived from this data. In order to apply quantitative methods to the data, I converted over 90 sites to a common classification system using the system made popular by Steve Van Wormer. Once converted, I grouped resources according to the unit of neighborhood. Standard archaeological practice uses the household as a unit for grouping resources. The neighborhood unit provided the benefit of allowing smaller sites to contribute to the data. I then applied activity group analysis, bottled product analysis, culinary bottle analysis, ceramic economic scaling, and functional artifact profiling analytical tools to the data and compared the resulting patterns to those that Van Wormer had observed using other reference sites. Reflecting on my experience in cultural resource management, I also explored how CRM practices affect the recording of resources and the relationship those practices have with academic research. Although I expected the data to exhibit a new urban upper class pattern in some areas and urban middle class in others, most of the data registered between urban middle class and small town working class. Unexpectedly, urban patterns across San Diego were similar to each other, yet notably different than the patterns seen in other reference cities in the southwest. Through the course of this project I expanded the database of comparative sites, developed artifact profiles for individual neighborhoods and the trolley suburbs as a whole, and incorporated previously ignored small isolated refuse deposits in order to contribute to a greater understanding of the San Diego trolley neighborhoods.
